


i want your midnights (in too deep)

by artificialmay



Category: iCarly
Genre: F/M, i was feeling sad and rewatching icarly so i wrote this, uwu what is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-04 00:51:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17294540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artificialmay/pseuds/artificialmay
Summary: sam puckett thinks a lot at midnight. it's when people come and go and love and die and now all of a sudden she's nostalgic and pining and in love with a boy who won't love her again. she's had her shot and it won't work. that she knows; but midnights still have a way of confounding her.or, i love icarly, will go down with this ship and use too many commas.





	i want your midnights (in too deep)

  


Retrospect is one hell of a drug, and there’s nothing like a Carly Shay New Year’s party to bring up the more tender memories of one’s youth. Sam Puckett had spent most of the party careening around the loft, beer in hand, refusing to drink one of Carly’s “girly” cruisers. With a reputation for being both a messy drunk and a heavyweight, Sam was in no way new to testing the limits of what she could do and what she could get away with under the excuse of being 21 and now therefore “legally allowed to do this”. Now though, with seventeen minutes and thirty four seconds until the start of the new year, she was alone, out on the fire escape, a whole bottle of cheap and sugary prosecco that she’d grabbed with the _intention_ of drinking, now that she rolled the lip of between her thumbs. Thinking. Lamenting.

Sam Puckett was many things, but a moper she was not. This didn’t stop her alcohol soaked brain from picking up on the many moments in her life she’d carefully categorised in her memory to only think of once or twice and rewind and pick over every small little detail.

 _On this fire escape you had your first kiss!_ Her brain exalted jubilantly. Sam tiredly closed her eyes and rolled her eyes up on their sockets until they hurt, trying to not think of the one person she’d been adequately successful in avoiding for the past few hours, and if she was honest, few years.

Carly had only left Seattle for two years before coming back six months prior, and she’d come back expecting things would be the same. And they were, to an extent. Sam still loved meat, Gibby still got shirtless at inopportune times, Spencer still set things on fire and Freddie was still, Freddie. What hadn’t changed was as well that Sam still loved Freddie, painfully, especially as in the years Carly had been gone, Sam and Freddie had slowly become more distant without iCarly or school, and Freddie’s girlfriends and their courses, and Sam’s absolute cowardice. For all her tough bravado, she was a chicken.

Thankfully, Carly coming back had brought back the natural banter between the trio, and they’d started to mend. Or in Sam’s case, fall further apart because the close proximity reminded her just what the distance had been doing. Taking her mind off the neat little tech nerd, who was so so unlike anything Sam had ever liked. She put her head against the rough brick wall, remembering.

The few sweet yet bitter weeks they’d been officially dating after she’’d made a fool of herself at the lock in then discovered after checking in to the mental institution that Freddie liked her too. And of course, she remembered how it had ended.

* * *

 “Let’s break up at midnight,” he’d said, pulling her back into the elevator in their final few kisses. They’d had one and a half hours of just talking, kissing, being, where, ironically, they’d finally found that middle ground Carly had been talking about. In the liminal space of a travelling elevator that wasn’t really travelling anywhere; in fact, Spencer had to have been wondering why he had to take the stairs; Sam and Freddie had finally remembered why they liked each other, why they fought each other, why they were willing to kiss on a school rooftop or a mental hospital, take risks for the other and their love when they weren’t even sure of themselves.

Midnight.

She’d been waiting for midnight with a harrowing dread. No! She wanted to exclaim. We shouldn’t break up at midnight, in fact we shouldn’t break up at all! She wanted to take Freddie in her arms, Freddie who was suddenly startlingly taller than she, and not scrawny but with the hint of a muscled shoulder and he would be hers. If only they stayed in the elevator then they would still be a couple, and not the weird forced-relationship-from-some-connection-Sam-now-doubted. Whatever the chiz that was.

Every passing second had felt like an epoch to her. Each breath she’d drawn had spanned centuries and each laugh, or smile or moment when she’d notice Freddie staring (with some emotion, surely not _wistfully_?) at her had meandered in that one-and-a-half-hours-of-bliss. Yet the time spanning being pulled back into the elevator and when she finally flicked the switch at that black black hour had also felt as though she’d eaten a whole ham, flying past in mere seconds. Although, she usually didn’t have a pool of regret congealing in her stomach after finishing a ham. Now, emotion rained through her bones. She’d walked home, her mother barely acknowledging she’d been gone, barely acknowledging herself and flopped onto her bed. On the walk home, she’d thought she’d cry. It was surprising then, that as soon as she was in a comfortable and private much conducive to having a solid sobbing session, her tear ducts felt pickled, and all she could do was stare listlessly at the wall, the ghost of Freddie’s kiss on her lips and his hands on her heart.

It was for the best.

It was for the best.

It was for the best.

The more she repeated this mantra, the more she thought about it, the more she agreed with it. Didn’t Carly say so? And when had Carly ever been wrong? They’d been ripping apart iCarly, they’d been stretching Carly and Gibby and themselves and everyone. The rarely listened to logical part of Sam’s brain knew that couples shouldn’t fight all the time. They were toxic to each other and to others and they’d only been together a few, fleeting weeks. Mrs Benson hated her. They were only in high school, what did they know about love and relationships and other affairs? God the reasons stacked up like little tetris pixels, a big piece missing that would refuse to fall into place, that would delete the blinking message I-STILL-LOVE-YOU-FREDDIE! that was flashing in her mind.

As she finally fell into a listless sleep an hour before she needed to be awake to get to school, she wondered if Freddie was feeling as pathetically emotional as she was.

* * *

  
A loud clunk brought her back to the present, eight minutes from the new year. Her now drunk bottle of prosecco (since when had she become an anxiety drinker?) lay sideways, chipped from the fall with the dregs of the bubbly liquid leaking onto the ground and staining the cool stone. Worried someone (Carly) would find her in this state and try to put her to bed, she got herself up, clinging to the building’s exterior in order to not fall back down and split her head open on the concrete beneath her. She opened the fire door with its signature loud creak, and step by step, made her way back to Carly’s apartment. Carly was waiting by the door, an anxious expression on her face, Pear Phone in hand and an equally concerned looking but also very hot looking boy by her arm.

 

Safe to say, Sam was not fully in control of her mental faculties.   


“Freddaaaaaaayyy!” she exclaimed, trailing off with a soft burp, the carbonation of her night’s beverages settling in her stomach. “I wanted to see you!”  
Freddie quirked his eyebrow, in the way that always made Same melt from the inside and glanced towards Carly.  
“Sam, where were you? It’s almost time for the countdown and I was scared you’d gone somewhere and gotten hurt-”   
“Carls, you don’t have to worry about me babe,” slurred Sam, cutting off the wide eyed brunette. “I’m always okay. We’ve been over this,” she continues, softening her tone as to not inadvertently hurt Carly’s feelings. “I just wanna talk to Fredward right now!”  
Again, Carly and Freddie shared a glance and both seemed to hesitate, until Sam grabbed Freddie’s arm and wrenched him over to where she was.  
“Shut the door Carly,” she tried to say, but the alcohol got in the way, until Carly recognised what Sam was attempting to mime and retreated reluctantly, leaving a very drunk Sam and a slightly confused Freddie in the hallway outside the apartment.

  
“What’s up Sam?” asked Freddie, a hint of hostility in his words. “You’ve barely talked to me all night and now you want to chat? What’s up Puckett?”  
“I was thinking about you,” said Sam, meekly, dropping her gaze and laughing nervously. “Us.”  
Freddie exhaled, obviously uncomfortable, obviously not wanting to discuss this either. “God we’re going to miss the countdown Sam.”  
“You getting a midnight kiss Freddie boy? It’s a tradition,” slurred Sam, puckering her mouth and making kissy faces up at Freddie, who was standing completely straight, a contrast to Sam’s wavering and leaning on her feet.  
“Sam-”  
“Come find me when the ball drops babe,” she continued, her mouth running away from her and only a small part of her brain wailing sirens and alarms. She’s vaguely aware she’ll regret this in the morning, but for now she knows that the damage is done.  


Freddie looks as though he’s been smacked with the buttersock.   
“Sam, you don’t know what you’re saying.”  
It’s Sam’s turn to turn ramrod straight and still, and Freddie’s turn to shuffle nervously under her piercing laser gaze.  
“I think I do Fredmund,” she retorted. “I think you know too.”  
Freddie can’t meet her eyes, which is such a pity because hers are looking him directly in his wandering gaze.  
“Do you want me to spell it out for you?” The taunting tone has returned to her voice, the one that they’d heard so much of when they were kids, so much when they were teens, and finally until it became too sharp and sour and eventually wasn’t heard at all. Freddie flinches.   
“Maybe you should,” he says, finally looking Sam in the eye, and she’s so taken aback she forgets her words for a second.   


But they come to her. They always do. Those four words, that mantra she’d repeated that night and subconsciously ever since when the night got quiet and pensive. She’s so quiet she’s not sure he hears so she repeats herself.  
“Let’s break up at midnight.”  
“What are you on about?”  
She steels herself, the infamous Sam-Puckett-cold-heartedness wrapping around her. She misread the situation, she thinks. This is all wrong, wrong, wrong.  


Nevertheless, she persists.   


“That’s what you said when we were dumb teenagers who fought too much for the wrong reasons and hated each other and liked each other and I don’t want to say love because that’s dumb and I was young and thought you were the end of the world and in a way you were. And you said we could break up at midnight that one night and we did and we thought it was for the best because, God, there was no relationship more fucked up than ours.”

In the pause where Sam needs to take a breath, a short shallow gasp, Freddie looks as though he’s about interrupt. She waves him down before the sound can even escape his mouth.

  
“You said let’s break up at midnight and when the clock struck 12 I knew I would never be over you or us or midnight and maybe it’s just the lonely talking but every single midnight I think of what could have been. And I wish it had been. I wish I hadn’t been a dumbass who was greedy and stupid and had to have her way and I wish I could have just cared for you the way you deserved and it’s too late now. But to cut the bullcrap, I still like you, and that’s why I’m coming to find you just before the one midnight everyone else cares about in the stupid year and drunkenly asking you to kiss me. Trust me Freddie Benson, I absolutely know what I’m talking about.”

 

She finishes her monologue, and feels oddly sober, a different kind of electricity coursing through her veins. Was it possible to feel like both ice and fire at once?  
In those seconds Freddie is silent, and so is she, and she does, feel burning cold and hot and she doesn’t know what she’s said. She’s ruined it. There’s another beat of silence and Sam knows that’s when Freddie will say something back, that’s just the natural flow of the conversation. But he doesn’t and instead she starts hearing the countdown just inside the door.

 

“Twenty”  
“Nineteen”  
_“Eighteen”  
_“Seventeen”

  
“Sam, I-” Freddie begins but cuts himself off. Did Sam think she’d be spilling her guts and receiving nothing in return on New Year’s Eve? No. But here she is.

 

 _“Sixteen”  
_ _“Fifteen”_

 

She considers how it would look, swivelling around and just forgetting everything and joining the celebration with Carly and Gibby and everyone else, but she knows that if this doesn’t get resolved now it will be yet another sleepless midnight and she’ll never be able to look Freddie in the eye again and she’ll be torn to shreds.

 

“Fourteen.”  
“Thirteen.”  
“Twelve.”  
_“Eleven.”  
_“Ten!”

 

Freddie looks like he might throw up and vaguely Sam registers he could be having a panic attack. It wouldn’t be the first time and she wants to comfort him but she knows that getting close is a bad idea.

 

“Nine!”  


Finally Freddie speaks.  


“Eight!”  


“Okay, this is hard-”  


“Seven!”  


“-you’ve been so open and here I am-”  


“Six!”  


“-and everything’s telling me-”  


“ _FIVE!”_

  
“-I’m not making sense I’m sorry.”  


“ _FOUR!”_

  
“Don’t apologise,” she says, her eyes shiny. “It’s me who should be sorry.  


“THREE!”  


They look at each other a long, long second.  


“TWO!”  


“Fuck it,” whispers Freddie. And her heart skips a beat and they-  


“ONE!”  


-fall into each other’s arms, lips meeting in a way that is familiar and home but still electric. Sam clings to him, his fingers entangle in her wild hair and she feels she’s about to burst, her lips encapsulating his, her heart hammering, matching time with the cheers and party poppers and Freddie’s own heart.

_“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”_

**Author's Note:**

> this was written to, semi-inspired by and and titled after new year's day by taylor swift and midnight mouths by lauren aquilina. 
> 
> there might be a part two to this. let me know if you'd like to see it :)
> 
> as always, i love to hear what y'all think of my fic. chuck me a comment here or message me on tumblr at artificial-may


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